Dream Play Build : Hands-On Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places

Shares a new approach to community engagement that brings art and creativity into discussions about urban design.

The room is dim, the chairs are in perfectly lined rows. The city planner puts up a color-coded diagram of the street improvementproject, dreading the inevitable angry responses. Jana loves her community and is glad to be able to attend the evening meeting, and she has a lot of ideas for community change. Butshe has a hard time hearing, and can’t see the diagrams clearly. She leaves early. It’s time to imagine a different type of community engagement – one that inspires connection, creativity, and fun. People love their communities and want them to become safer, healthier, more prosperous places. But the standardapproach to public meetings somehow makes everyone miserable. Conversations that should be inspiring can becomeshouting matches. So what would it look like to facilitate truly meaningful discussions between citizens and planners?What if they could be fun?For twenty years, James Rojas and John Kamp have been looking to art, creative expression, and storytelling to shake upthe classic community meeting. In Dream Play Build, they share their insights into building common ground and invitingactive participation among diverse groups. Their approach, “Place It!,” draws on three methods: the interactivemodel-building workshop, the pop-up, and site exploration using our senses. Using our hands to build and create iscentral to what makes us human, helping spark ideas without relying on words to communicate. Deceptively playful, this method is remarkably effective at teasing out community dreams and desires from hands-on activities. Dream Play Buildoffers wisdom distilled from workshops held around the world, and a deep dive into the transformational approach andresults from the South Colton community in southern California. While much of the process was developed throughin-person meetings, the book also translates the experience to online engagement--how to make people remember theirconnections beyond the computer screen. Inspirational and fun, Dream Play Build celebrates the value of engaging with the dreams we have for our communities. Readers will find themselves weaving these artful, playful lessons and methods into their own efforts for making changewithin the landscape around them.